


The Lamplighter

by rainer76



Series: How did you Meet? [1]
Category: Ripper Street
Genre: Drake POV, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 17:43:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/942797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/rainer76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How did you meet?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lamplighter

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for season one in its entirety.

_“Reid, the police **have** surgeons.”_

_“They are drunkards and incompetents.  I would have you.”_

\-       ( ** _I Need a Light_** \-  episode one, season one).

 

 

 

 

Hobbs isn’t yet buried before the mutters begin, rough men in taverns who sing the boy a lament, hands curled around a quarter pint, their voices rising.  Drake hears the fury, bears witness to their blame.  He sees the resentment flare up against Captain Jackson like the strike of a match held against kindling.  He was always the outsider, their surgeon – but since Goodnight cast his wicked deeds against the constabulary, took Hobbs so callously – the patience they respected Jackson has dwindled. They talk among themselves their men in blue, and Sergeant Drake, lowborn, no richer than they, listens.

They don’t censure themselves, although the Bobbies cast a wary look in his direction.  They know he is Reid’s dog, but not all things are reported up the chain of command any more than all things are reported down.  Drake is Reid’s sergeant, his tooth and his bloody claw, but before that he was an NCO in the Queen’s Army – the stalwart between the officers and the enlisted men - Drake holds more secrets, curries more confidences, than a sworn clergymen.

They say Hobbs died for nothing.  At the wake they shoulder at one another, recall the boy’s deeds, ribald his eagerness to learn and curse his (now) eternal youth.  They say darkly that Reid dispatched Hobbs alone, ferried him to his death.  They say, heatedly, that it was Jackson who brought this murderous felon amongst their rank, that he too, should be held accountable.

“And now the Inspector would have us defend him, this Yankee.” 

The cup hits the table hard, sloshes its contents against the stained cherry wood.  Merriel’s colour is high, cheeks flushed with alcohol, but his words do not slur, the outrage in his voice carries clear across the room. 

“The surgeon our Ripper, sitting pretty amongst us all this time, do you believe it, Harold?”

 _You can’t possibly believe it,_ Reid had exclaimed, face grey with shock, as Drake had stalked away, as every man in the cop-shop turned his back to Jackson’s plight. 

Drake cocks his head to the side, he steadies his feet against the floor and leans his weight against the central pillar.  It would be easy to name Jackson as Ripper, a surgeon bloodied in battle, of shady past and silver tongue, except he made his home among the whores he would have supposedly slaughtered and blaming an outsider, Drake thinks darkly, is always society’s first recourse.

“Ripper or no he is still a murderer,” Harold muses.  “You saw how cowardly he dispatched Frank Goodnight.”

A bullet to the forehead was a kindness.  

Drake would have gutted Goodnight slow, let his innards spill onto the filthy cobblestone; pale and sweating but by God still _alive_ as the alley dogs gnawed at his intestines.  Drake would have made Goodnight watch his guts being eaten before blood loss and toxic shock shuffled him onward into the afterlife.   If he was in the mood for clemency, Drake might have been persuaded to have him drawn and quartered, but he feels no clemency to the Pinkerton, not then and not now. His rage is barely contained by his skin; it alights through his marrow like phosphorus, Greek fire.

Stinston, twenty and eight years of age, shakes his head as he enters the conversation. 

“Goodnights death caused me no grief.  The gunfight was a gentlemen’s agreement they willingly entered - both parties _knew_ only one could walk away - so not murder in my book but justice swiftly served.”

“Not the death,” Harold corrects, staring into the flame.  “But the manner of trickery displayed.   There is no honour inside the Captain, and blinding Goodnight with the sun’s glare so he would waste his single bullet on misaim, only to stride within _three_ feet of the swine to end him?  That, I would say, is as cold blooded as any Ripper deed.”

Treacherous, Drake would argue, and as such _not_ the modus operandi of Whitechapel’s most feared son.  “Jackson is not the Ripper,” Drake mutters, dismissively.

“Hobbs lies on a cold slab yet because of him,” Merriel exclaims, face taut with anger.  “I do not understand why Reid brought the American into our company!  And I will not act to help him now as he stands accused of Ripper-hood, no sir, I shall not.” 

Hobbs lies upon a slab because Reid sent him out to spy alone, without back-up, a boy with no real experience to speak of.  

Hobbs lies on a cold slab because he interfered, he neglected his duties of observing to play the hero; Goodnight wasn’t there to murder the Widow Fanthorpe but to deliver her to his master, Swift; if Hobbs had followed his instructions to the letter, if he had stayed fast then reported to Inspector Reid with the kidnapper’s location and name, he would have been alive this day, to drink his cupful among the men of the blue. 

Hobbs lies dead because Swift and his Pinkerton dog, Goodnight, came to collect the woman engineer for White Star Lines, and they would have come to these shores to take her whether Jackson be here or no. 

Tiredly, Drake thinks, Hobbs lies dead because of who knows what reason.

As Reid asserted, there is grave injustice in hanging Jackson for Ripper’s crimes, but fate is a fickle mistress and there is no doubt in any of their minds that the surgeon has committed murder of a different ilk, in albeit, a different land; while his name is attached to the wrong crime here, there is ironic recompense for those unknown victims on the American soils, that in their buried bones, they should somehow _know_ their killer has been brought to heel. Murder has been committed, therefore, murder shall be done, and thus the cycle is repeated. Egyptian goddesses, Drake reminds himself: their celestial humour was always bent toward cruelty.   For his part, Drake never cared for the Yankee to begin with.

“Did you see the Inspector’s face when Alice Hobbs walked passed this day?  I bet you a farthing he didn’t know her name.”

“I bet you a half-penny he never suspected Hobbs were married in the first place,” Merriel retorts, his face twisted with contempt.  “He cares not for his own men, indeed, rumour has it that he sits outside the Captain’s cell this very night, a bottle of whiskey shared between them.”

There’s silence as the gathered men digest that. 

“Ever wonder how they met?” someone else ventures, tone vexed.

“I hearsay it was the molly house, he sleeps among the whores, perhaps Jackson shares their trade too, pretty cocksucker lips wrapped around….”

“None of that now,” Drake growls.  He feels his spine straighten, his fists clench with anger.  He doesn’t care for the Captain in the least but Reid…Reid is a different matter altogether.  “You want to keep your head about you and take care with what you say this night, Merriel; besmirch the Inspector’s name again, within _my_ hearing, and you and I will parry with more than words.”

Merriel has cauliflower ears, a boxer’s broken nose; he has been blue for almost twenty years.  He was part of Alberline’s original taskforce when the Ripper first tore Whitechapel apart, exposed the bone-work of her interconnected streets, her people - and her blackened womb - to the wider world.  It’s been said Jack the Ripper’s name has been known as far and wide as the Argentines.  Merriel’s breath is foul with drink, his eyes priggish.   “No?  How did they meet then?  If anyone in this company would know, Sergeant, surely it must be you.”

It’s Jarrod who breaks the tension, who speaks quickly into the silence.  “I heard it was the Captain who tended the Inspector’s wound…his…his shoulder I mean. That he saved Reid’s life on the banks of the river one year past, which is why the Inspector ignores our own surgeons in favour of the outsider.”

Drake stares at him incredulously.  “Are you daft lad, or just plain fanciful?”

“Neither sir, just…. it was a theory is all.”

“Well keep them to yourself.  You bunch are no better than a pack of gossiping house-wives.”

Merriel looks away, the antagonism simmering into melancholy, his disposition as swift as any drunkard.  He blinks rapidly, staring at the lamplight, at the shadows its throws into stark relief.  “No matter, for either way Inspector Reid is not here this night, his absence stands as an insult to Hobbs and the boy’s memory; he is a fine investigator no doubt, Sergeant, but Reid is no leader of men.”

And the dickens of it is; Merriel is absolutely right.  Drake was an NCO in the Queen’s army, he fought beside Colonel Madoc Faulkner from boyhood into threescore and he knows what leadership, _true_ leadership, feels like.  Faulkner, despite his crimes, held it in spades.  He could command men with a deft word or a firm grip, with a voice that thundered down the rank and file.  When faced with serving Faulkner or continuing onward with Reid, Drake knew where his inclination lay. 

It was Faulkner who had said it, sitting across the table, facing Reid down derisively.   _You are unqualified to command._   And there is a part of Drake, hidden deep and never spoken aloud, that fundamentally agrees.

It would have done much for the men’s morale to see their leader among them tonight.  Instead he plots to overthrow Aberline’s case, he would have the Ripper legend – his murders - lay open like a festering wound, instead of sewing it shut, named, trialled, and the perpetrator executed for his crimes.  He would give Whitechapel’s citizens no relief from a name that haunts them still. 

“He paid his respects to Hobbs this afternoon,” Drake says hollowly.  “It’s the living that concerns him now.”

Reid is like no man he has known.  He is not as careworn as the officers Drake has previously served, not browbeaten or stooped low like Aberline.  He is transfixed by modern technology, wide-eyed at the advances in science; he is both utterly focused and completely blind to those around him.  He doesn’t know how to give up - not in anything – save for his marriage.

But more so, Reid refuses to let Ripper’s memory overshadow every deed, act, and criminal he _has_ managed to put away these past months, to lessen the merits they have performed.  Reid solves crimes with a doggedness of character, using every modern tool at his disposal, and though he overlooks Drake – seemingly overlooks his men entirely at times – he displays moments of empathy that can astound Drake.  Forgiveness is in short supply among these streets and while Reid never spoke of it, he _must_ have known Drake had participated in Faulkner’s robbery willingly.

He would have continued with the robbery, too, and not attempted to foil it if the minter’s life hadn’t been taken, if Faulkner hadn’t lied about the degree of violence deployed. 

Faulkner commanded his loyalty, yes, he drew Drake toward him with charisma and a shared history of battle, but he thinks Reid has command of his oaths, of the person Drake would _aspire_ to become, Reid is not a leader through word or charm, but through action.

“He is not here this night because Hobb’s murder is already solved, his killer slain by the very Yankee in our cell.  He’s not here because he is trying to solve another case, a _different_ crime, without the benefit of H-division behind him or his Sergeant at hand.” 

Drake staggers away from the central pillar; wWithout its solid support he feels unsteady, as if he’s drunk too much and the land turned watery beneath him. 

“Hate the Inspector for that if you will, men, but the truth is, he’s a better police officer than the lot of us put together.”

He’s never trusted Jackson or cared for how Reid pursued him, how he hunted the doctor down tenaciously.  He’s never liked how Reid turned to Jackson first, eyes keen as he awaited the surgeon’s verdict, how he poured police resources ( _a raise_ , Drake had prayed, _for the loyal service I have given these past years, if you should see fit, that is, Inspector_ – and the burn has near faded now, the memory of Reid's denial sunken low) how Reid spent precious finance on building H-division a dead-room, tiled, with filament lighting and warm water to boot, with every medical contrivance slotted into its modern drawers - the specifications fit for Baltimore’s John Hopkins – and how Jackson flinched when he first saw it, shaking his head, caught between ruefulness and blatant disbelief before, typically, he _belittled_ it.  

_“While I’m flattered, Reid, I have no call to be deputised.”_

“How did you get the Captain on our payroll then?” Drake had asked later.  He was sitting opposite the Inspector, his ribs bruised from the little blighters that had attacked them, and Thomas Gower was  freshly enlisted in the Queen’s Army, fourteen years of age and older still than Drake first was when he went to war. He had watched as Reid turned a foreign ring over in his hand, his actions studied, before locking it inside his top drawer.  “I had the impression the promise of his own dead-room didn’t work on the Captain, and the need to be seen 'favourably' by society doesn’t seem to blight him.”

“If the offer of a respectable job wasn’t enough to secure him to our side then I wagered a hefty dose of blackmail would suffice.”

It was simply said.  So simply in fact, that the meaning of the words didn’t register for a second, so out of character they appeared.  “Resort to bribery?  _You, sir?_   With what?”  Reid had stared at him, levelly, until Drake shifted uncomfortably, one arm braced under his ribs as he arose from the chair stiffly.  “Forgive me, sir, not a question I should be asking I suspect.”

The possessor started not long after that – _my American,_ Reid would declare.  _He’s with me,_ Reid would say - me, my, and mine, Reid would say – he slams an elbow into Jackson’s jaw when he believes _his_ American has lied about Long Susan’s involvement in a crime; he has the man dragged from his dirty bed-sheets when Jackson dallies too long against Reid’s summons, his skin smelling like sex, sweat and whores.  _You will bring him here trussed if you must_ , Reid had ordered flatly.  When Jackson levels a gun at the back of Drake’s skull and asks for his ring to be returned, when he announces he’s killed lawmen before and says it so  _calmly,_ Reid lets _his_ American run rather than be caught and handed to the Pinkerton’s, and later still - when he’s accused of murder and cuffed in a cell - Reid spends the night on the opposite side of the bars, the two of them shoulder to shoulder with a whiskey bottle shared between them.

Drake has never understood it, the curious friendship that sprung up between them so swiftly. 

Only that Jackson sees details that others miss, he brings light to an investigation that is muddied with blood and dirt, sullied by politics.  He is often the provider of their first clue, on occasion, he has had cause to be the lethal settler of their investigations, and Drake suspects that _me, mine and my_ , are words that were not often directed at the Captain before.

How did they meet, the men in blue ask?

Some say it went like this - that there was an ex-medical doctor, ranked as a Captain in the US army – who lived inside a molly house.  That in the year 1888 there were estimated to be some twelve hundred prostitutes’ working in the Whitechapel district alone, and that amongst this number, a spell of brutal murders would occur.  The head of the investigation, Inspector Aberline would search fruitlessly for the culprit, but with increasing public pressure and police ridicule at an all time high, he would be rotated out of the case and replaced by a young Inspector by the name of Edmund Reid.  Whitechapel was a cesspool of conflicting politics, some said the devil itself had come to their steps, others said women with loose skirts, scant morality, were the very cause of it.

In 1888 there was a push to have all the brothels closed and the whores moved onward.  Reid scoffed at the notion of blame, turned a blind eye to the issued order, failed to uphold the law. It was said he held the belief that the girls were safer _off_ the streets rather than on. And that pushing the homeless onward didn’t eradicate them, or the underlying social problems that led to homelessness to begin with, all it did was shunt the problem onto someone else’s lap.  A blind eye, passing the responsibility to someone, anyone, else. If a serial killer had chosen his type of prey, then it stood to reason he would _follow_ his type of prey, be it in Whitechapel or a township under a different name, it wouldn't stop the murders.   That wasn’t justice, Reid had argued, it wasn’t even smart policing. 

It was politics. 

In September of that year, Aberline - rotated off the case but still a working Inspector - shut down twenty-nine of the sixty-four existing brothels in Whitechapel.  Two weeks later, on Sunday the 30th, the double murders of Stride and Eddowes, separated by four sordid alleyways, occurred.  Mary Kelly’s body wouldn’t be discovered until almost two months later.

It was said they met when Aberline personally ordered Reid to shut down a molly house, that he barged through Long Susan’s front door, came face to face with the frightened girls gathered on the steps, their faces painted prettily, and _hesitated_.

It was said he met a man with a drawling accent, a quicksilver mind, and a bargain was struck, Long Susan’s house, the girls she ran, would remain unseen by the law in return for one act of forensic examination –a non-Ripper case, it turned out to be, the next murder in Whitechapel was between a Stevedore and his brother - and after Homer Jackson overturned the police surgeon’s findings, brought to light three separate and key pieces of information, the evidence was tallied by Reid and solved with record speed.  Reid had been hunting Jackson for his own team since, building a dead-room as incentive, and when that failed to work, declaring Mathew Judge dead, all evidence of him erased save for the ring Reid kept, locked safely inside his own desk. 

If Reid is the centre pillar of their trio, the one man who will not quit, then Drake is it’s gloved fist, and Jackson - Jackson is Reid’s - an amalgamation of whatever is needed, criminal or doctor, executor and sly friend, he’s a lamplighter on the darkened streets they tread.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be one of those 'three ways Reid and Jackson could have met' things, and it might still be. Don't ask me why I'm writing Ripper Street - I don't think the series actually has a fan-base - but I just mainlined eight episodes in twenty-four hours and apparently, the series is on my mind.


End file.
